Echoes of the Corporate Ghost

Chapter One: The Weight of a Ghost The Starfarer thrummed beneath Elias Trent like a tired heartbeat echoing in the endless silence of space. He sat alone in the cockpit, staring out at the nebula smeared across the void—electric blues and bruised purples drifting like smoke over glass. Once, sights like this had filled him with wonder. Pride. The certainty of belonging to something bigger than himself. Now, it was just light on darkness. Beauty wasted on a man who had already died once. His ship bore the truth more honestly than he did. The Starfarer’s hull was scarred, panels patched together with salvaged metal, engines coughing whenever he pushed them too hard. She was a vessel built for ghosts—broken, limping, but stubbornly alive. Much like her captain. Elias’s fingers brushed the dented console. Cold steel beneath calloused skin. The texture sparked memories sharper than blades. Cheers echoing through a mess hall, his flight jacket heavy with the medals of a decorated ace. The roar of engines as his squadron cut impossible paths through asteroid mazes, hauling precious medical supplies to colonies left choking by corporate greed. The way admirals had once clapped his shoulder with fatherly pride, calling him “son.” All of it ashes now. The memory that burned hottest came from Ganymede. His squadron had answered a desperate call—colonists under siege. The ambush struck without warning. Comms dead, chaos splitting the stars apart. And then, through a secret back channel, the voice he trusted most: “Stand down, Elias. Let them pass.” His XO. His second. The woman who’d once made him believe in tomorrow. But he hadn’t stood down. He’d led his people into the storm, carving victory out of fire and wreckage. When the smoke cleared, the enemy retreated. The colony lived. But his squadron was gone, scattered to drifting ash. When he limped home expecting honor, the court-martial waited instead. The charges: insubordination. Recklessness. Treason. Her testimony, cold as vacuum, sealed his fate. He’d been branded a traitor, stripped of rank, cast into shadow. Trust died that day. Hope followed it to the grave. Now Elias moved through life like a man wearing someone else’s skin. He smuggled goods the corporations refused to supply—medical packs to plague zones, food replicators to rebel stations, black-market code to hackers who wanted to cripple the system. The credits were thin, the risks heavy, but it kept the Starfarer flying and the ghosts at bay. Port Kestrel welcomed men like him. Or rather, it tolerated them. A floating city where every corridor reeked of ozone and sweat, where credits spoke louder than morality, and where the gleam of corporate security drones never let you forget whose chains bound the stars. The Starfarer docked in Bay 47 with a grinding shudder. The landing clamps bit down hard, echoing through metal ribs. Elias shut down the engines, listening to the silence swallow their final groan. Silence and the hiss of recycled air, carrying the faint stench of stale ale from the bar-lined corridors outside. He lingered a moment, eyes on the stars beyond the viewport. He wondered if anyone still cursed his name out there—or if time had scrubbed him clean from memory. Being forgotten was worse than being hated. The docking bay doors slid open. Noise and light poured in, harsh and artificial. Elias pulled his coat tighter around his broad shoulders, tugged the hood low, and slipped into the current of bodies. His scarred face drew no looks; in Port Kestrel, everyone had scars, whether on their skin or their soul. Corporate patrol drones buzzed overhead, scanners washing the crowd in red beams. Elias kept his head down, his forged ID chip humming faintly against his wrist. One wrong blink and his past would burn across every screen in the bay. But the drones passed on. Ghosts were hard to catch. That night, when he finally collapsed in his cabin, a message cut through the silence. His console blinked once—then again. Private. Encrypted. No traceable origin. He almost deleted it. Instinct screamed trap. Every smuggler knew the kind of jobs that arrived out of nowhere with too much pay attached. But something—loneliness, desperation, the whisper of freedom—made him open it. The contract was simple: fly to an abandoned mining station deep in the asteroid belt, retrieve a sealed crate, and deliver it discreetly to Port Helix. Payment upon delivery: enough credits to disappear forever. Elias leaned back in his chair, staring at the pulsing icon of the offer. He imagined vanishing to some nameless frontier, a world untouched by corporate claws. No more hiding. No more ghosts. He accepted. The journey into the asteroid belt was long and silent. The Starfarer weaved between ancient rock titans drifting in the void, her hull shuddering when fragments scraped too close. Shadows loomed—derelict mining rigs, rusted husks of ships abandoned decades ago. The perfect graveyard for secrets. Docking clamps groaned as the Starfarer latched onto the forgotten station. Inside, the air was cold and damp, stale with decades of neglect. His boots echoed on hollow floors as he followed flickering lights toward the rendezvous point. Two technicians waited—nervous men with darting eyes and trembling hands. They said little, only shoved the crate toward him before retreating into shadows as though afraid the cargo might burn them alive. The crate was plain black steel, locked tight. But it vibrated faintly in his hands, like a heartbeat. Back aboard, Elias sat in the dim glow of his cockpit, the crate at his feet. He told himself not to open it. He told himself it wasn’t his business. A smuggler’s survival depended on silence. But curiosity was louder than caution. With a hiss, the lid parted. Inside, nestled in shock foam, was a sphere of silver metal. Its surface shimmered with veins of light that pulsed like veins beneath skin. Circuits alive. The moment his eyes locked on it, the hairs on his arms rose. This wasn’t just technology. It felt… awake. An AI core. Advanced. Illegal. The kind of creation whispered about in black-market stories, said to hold the power to rewrite entire systems. The air in the cockpit seemed to thin. Elias’s pulse thundered in his ears. He wasn’t hauling contraband anymore—he was carrying a war. The Starfarer creaked around him, as though the ship itself sensed the shift. For the first time in years, Elias Trent felt the weight of destiny pressing down on his shoulders. And somewhere in the dark between the stars, predators had already scented the trail. There was no turning back.